A father and son shovel snow from a driveway; a boy accidentally sets himself on fire; two boys fish for bluegill; a young drag queen returns home to die. At the center of it all, a teenage boy's suicide resonates through the lives of those closest to him. The poems in Bruce Snider's Paradise, Indiana describe a place where mundane events neighbor the most harrowing.

Shaped by the author's experiences growing up in rural Indiana, Snider investigates the landscapes traditionally claimed by male poets such as James Wright, James Dickey, and Richard Hugo, whose visions of place rarely,...

In her first collection of poems, Abigail Cloud draws inspiration from nineteenth-century European Romantic ballets, which often portrayed scorned females as mystical spirits such as sylphs, shades, and wilis. Some of these creatures seduced men into dancing until they died -- punishment for inconstancy or lured them into love. For Cloud, the dark gravity that holds these enchanters to the earth is the same as our own and thus these demons are as everyday as air.

Sylph filters our world through the lenses of dance, folklore, and history, revealing our contemporary lives to be dreamlike...

In his latest collection, Random Exorcisms, Adrian C. Louis writes poems with the rough-edged wit and heart-wrenching sincerity that make him one of the seminal voices in contemporary American poetry. Deeply rooted in Native American traditions and folklore, these poems tackle a broad range of subjects, including Facebook, zombies, horror movies, petty grievances, real grief, and pure political outrage. In a style entirely his own, Louis writes hilarious, genuine, self-deprecating poems that expel a great many demons, including any sense of isolation a reader might feel facing a harsh and...